Perhaps tonight isn’t the best of nights to sit at home and listen to Stabbing Westward. But it’s already 2 hours to bedtime. Too late to make something of the evening.
Time and Distance
I am not in the habit of discussing matters of the heart publicly, but if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to the past few months….
I’m coming out of this Thing I had with someone. It was never really defined, so Thing is what we’ll call it. By the strictest definition, yeah, it was a relationship, but it is what it was: enigmatic on the best of days.
She and I had a hard time throughout most of it; the open questions, the crossfire of intents. The pattern, as it played out, was “start, stop, start, crash, kinda start, kinda fizzle.” Although we’d been friends for years before we made a go at it, it just did not work out for reasons I’ll not describe in public.
I’m a little numb from the experience, and dumb on where to go from here. Relationships, good or bad, are disruptive to the status quo. Habits change, plans get pushed out, internal desires get sidetracked at the first glimpse of no longer going it alone. Now on the other side of it, it’s just me, sorting the pieces and remembering where I left off.
I will say, emphatically, that she still has my adoration, respect and friendship. Always will. She is a strong and dignified human being. I can only hope the feeling is mutual. Maybe time apart will help us to sort out our feelings and let us restore our friendship to something resembling what it was.
Dear Ticks
Since I’ve made the conscious choice to buck my biological imperative and not father any offspring, then obviously my purpose on this earth is to help others spawn and raise their own. I say to hell with that. If I’m this misanthropic against adults, what the hell do I care for their children? Do you really think I’m going to play the role of the matchmaker, bellhop, busboy, and babysitter? Hell no.
If anything, my role should be to make it harder for you to raise your fat little ticks. To let them do all the sucking they want on you and you alone. To add disruptions to your spawning. To sweep the eggs out of the riverbed. To lead the tadpoles astray into predator territory. Only the strongest will survive, right?
With the exception of a few of you parents (friends whom I know to be highly capable of the job), the rest of you get none of my sympathy or support.
Anybody else agree?
Transcode Is the Home of Count Flacula
Now that my CD collection’s ripped to FLAC, I had to filter through my entire MP3 collection and pull out all of the MP3 rips of said albums. That took a few hours, to say the least. Still have those copies, just in case, but after symlinking my FLAC folder into my music folder so my player software can pick up the new files, I really don’t need the old MP3 rips. But they’re there, y’know, just in case.
I use Rhythmbox for my music listening. It’s OK as a player, and it’s got some…idiosyncrasies, but it’s usable. Usually. In my early phase of ripping my collection, I examined Rhythmbox’s handling of FLAC content. It plays fine, edits tags fine. It will even transcode the FLAC if you transfer it to a portable media device. The selection of file format is automatic based on the player, but will default to MP3. In your preferences, under “Music” tab, use the dropdown to select your preferred format — this is usually for ripping CDs with Rhythmbox (ugh, use Sound Juicer instead), but also applies to transcoding for media players. I edited my MP3 profile to encode at 256KB instead of my old 192KB.
That leaves the final piece of the puzzle: sharing this collection with portable thumbdrives. According to some docs out there, you can have Rhythmbox automatically transcode when copying media to a flash thumbdrive by placing an empty file called .is_audio_player in the root folder of the device. Then, when you insert the thumbdrive, Rhythmbox will notice, check for the file, and act like it’s a portable media device if it sees the file. Then you can drag-drop the files to the drive, and everything will be automatically transcoded. It’s a cludge, but what the hell.
As an aside: I know the latest version of Ubuntu desktop ejected Rhythmbox and is now using Banshee as the default player. I assume it’s got similar functionality, but I’ve not tested it myself. I’m just not ready to jump into “Natty Narwhal” or whatever they’re calling it. Progress comes with clenched fists.
Seedy Collection
It’s finally done. My month-long project to rip my entire CD collection into FLAC files was completed this afternoon. 560 albums, 186GB, roughly 339.2MB per album. Aside from a few low-priority sounds effects discs (and a copy of U2’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” which got destroyed in the ripping process), here’s my collection up to this point: